open monitoring distribution

Open Monitoring Distribution (OMD) is an Open Source network, server, and datacenter monitoring platform and it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s basically a bunch of different monitoring systems all pooled into one platform. My favorite part of OMD is that it includes Check_MK, which I think is the best monitoring interface out there. But, it’s a lot more than that. Here is a breif list of what OMD contains (there’s more than this).

Nagios

Icinga

Shinken

Check_MK

Multisite

DokuWiki

NagVis

pnp4nagios

rrdtool

That’s just a brief list of all the greatness that’s packaged into OMD. Every network and home lab should have an OMD installation running on a virtual machine to keep tabs on everything and alert you when something goes wrong. Today, I’ll be installing and configuring OMD on an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. So, lets get started already.

Installing OMD on Ubuntu 14.04

I always like to make sure everything is updated and upgraded when I’m setting up a new server. So lets go ahead and do that.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Now we can get to work installing OMD. Fortunately, there are OMD packages already made for some of the more popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu 14.04 included. You can see all of the available packages by clicking on this link. As of this writing, OMD version 1.20 is the latest so that’s what I’m going to install. Check and see what the latest version is before getting started.